Skip to content

Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs

Family and Work: The Family's Perspective

1 Introduction


It seems that concern is often being expressed in the public discourse about the consequences of the changing roles of women in society. In recent decades concern has been expressed particularly in relation to the potential impacts of maternal employment upon children. While there is a body of literature that considers this question, other research focuses on how the experience of having dual roles impacts on workers and the workplace. Some of the literature hypothesizes that family life impacts negatively on people's capacity to work. Among other explanations, this has been argued to be due to inter-role conflict in which the demands of one role interfere with fulfilling the demands of the other (Voydanoff & Donnelly, 1999) or as structural conflict, in which demands of one role create practical difficulty in managing the demands of the other (Piotrkowsky, 1979).

In research, the issue of the relationship between work and family life has largely focused on working parents, and the stress that they may experience from "balancing" their roles. There has been very little Australian qualitative research that explores the experience of family life for working families, particularly from the perspective of children.

In the United States, Ellen Galinsky's research programme into the children's perspective of work and family had a long development. A study of three small companies in New Jersey and New York, in which employees and their husbands/wives or partners and children were interviewed, highlighted the issue of listening to children for Galinsky. She noticed that children viewed their parents' working in quite unexpected ways, and that there was no research which explored this issue. In 1995 an interviewer talked "free-form" with a diverse group of 20 children of differing ages and backgrounds "to see what they thought the important issues were, to probe for the points of pain and the points of joy." Using the information gathered from this exercise a questionnaire was developed during 1996-1997, and focus groups and interviews were conducted with a non-random sample of parents in fifteen states and the District of Columbia, including 78 parents and 93 children - 171 individuals from 69 families. On the basis of this qualitative research, four constructs - focus, autonomy, support and demands - were seen as essential to understanding parents' stress and satisfaction. Questionnaires were developed for quantitative surveying of nationally representative groups of children and parents. In 1998 telephone interviews were conducted with a nationally representative sample of 605 employed parents with children 18 years or younger. Each interview took approximately 25 minutes. As a complement to the survey of parents, 1,023 children in third to twelfth grades completed a self-administered questionnaire in school time.

The results of the surveys, with examples from the qualitative study, were reported in an easily consumable form in 1999 in "Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think About Working Parents", republished in 2000 as "Ask the Children: The Breakthrough Study That Reveals How to Succeed at Work and Parenting".

While the emphasis in the title of the book, and in presentations about the research, is on the children and what they say, the retitled edition of Galinsky's book is a clearer guide to its content. The children in Galinsky's quantitative research were asked to "grade" their parents on a variety of parenting skills acknowledged in the literature to be important for children's development. These grades were then analysed with reference to the following variables:Children in grades 7 to 12 were asked some questions with slightly different wording, and were asked some additional questions, including questions which asked about specific aspects of work-family spillover and what the best and worst thing about a parent's working was.

There are some methodological issues associated with Galinsky's research, but this report is not the place to deal with those in detail. It is worth noting, however, that all tests that sought to explain differences in children's ratings of their parents' parenting skills according to parental employment were made using children's own reports of all variables. That is, the children reported their parents' work status using the response options "full-time", "about half-time" or "less that half time". Similarly, the children reported how many hours parents spent with them each day and on weekends, and whether their family was financially healthy or not. The children and parents in the quantitative surveys were not from the same family, so Galinsky relied on the representativeness of the samples to give her the capacity to compare what parents and children in similar circumstances might report. This means that direct tests of the difference in children's ratings of parents according to their employment status were made using the children's own reports of parental employment status only in terms of whether a parent works "full-time", "about half time" or "less than half time". On the one hand there are problems inherent in having children estimate variables such as hours, and money in any specific way, so having general categorical indications of such factors is probably more reliable. On the other hand, testing models that are based on a variable that has an underlying continuous distribution using only broad categories may lead to an underestimate of relationships. This is an important point because one of the strongest statements that is made, and which forms the foundation for the direction of the research, is that "in not a single analysis is the mother's employment status related to the way a child sees his or her mother or father. Neither is her working part-time or full-time" (1999, p 49, emphasis in original). The important issue of whether there are differential effects in children's ratings of their parents' skills according to how many hours parents work beyond these very general categories was not able to be addressed by Galinsky in this research. Furthermore, it was notable that in the present study, the parents' descriptions of themselves as working part-time reflected an extraordinary diversity in patterns of work, including 5 hours per week, 5-days a fortnight, 30 hours a week and a 9-day fortnight. The children in our sample were not asked to describe their parents' working hours in categories, but the parents' own attempts might raise concern about such estimates from children. Most of the children had a general idea of how many hours their parents worked, but the distinction between about half-time and less than half-time seems particularly difficult. More research is needed to convincingly answer the question of whether the number of hours of parental employment has any impact on how children perceive their parents.

Neither Galinsky's research, nor this parallel study, aims, or indeed has the capacity, to investigate outcomes for children. The focus of the research is squarely on the experience of home-life, and the way that children perceive their parents' parenting and how it may be affected by work. Similarly, the research explores the perceptions of parents with regard to how they feel they are managing their dual roles. These are important questions in themselves, and qualitative exploration of the experiences of these families can provide insight into the kinds of processes that operate within families, thus providing some clues to the kinds of strategies and interventions that may help people cope better with their particular set of circumstances. However, it is important not to confuse this kind of analysis with research that reports on how parental employment actually impacts on important developmental outcomes for children such as school achievement, and behavioural and emotional adjustment.

Return to top

Go to Chapter 2
Back to Contents page